Billionaire profile: Pan Sutong
From his first foray into electronics, Pan Sutong has moved on from being an underachiever at school to greater success in real estate and wine
Pan Sutong, the chairman of Goldin Properties Holdings, can seem like a character out of place and time. Hobnobbing with royalty, playing polo on his own grounds, quaffing HK$2,700 bottles of Bordeaux, Pan lives a life that would not seem out of place in Gilded Era America or Ancien Régime France.
Ironically, for a man who would become synonymous with the nouveau riche hyper-consumption that characterises modern Chinese capitalism, Pan completely missed the reforms which created it. In 1976, he was sent to California to live with his step-grandmother.
Pan was an underachiever educationally and often skipped classes. He never graduated high school or picked up much English. In 1984, he returned to China, using a loan from his family to set up a business in Hong Kong, Matsunichi Colour Display Monitor, specialising in selling Japanese electronics.
From distribution, Pan moved into manufacturing, and within 10 years Matsunichi commanded about 90 per cent of the production of karaoke monitors for the mainland's booming KTV market.
With Goldin, Pan branched out into real estate, the market in which he has seen his greatest success. As of May, his holdings in Goldin Financial and Goldin Properties were worth an estimated US$2.8 billion.
In a country already famed for ostentatious displays, Goldin's temples to wealth are impressive for their scope and ambition.
In Tianjin, a city of 14 million people about 30 minutes by bullet train from Beijing, the company is building Fortune Heights, a 220 acre, US$5 billion development featuring a 117-storey skyscraper, 64 mansion-like villas, an elite international school, a convention centre and views of the Tianjin Goldin Metropolitan Polo Club.
"I'm not satisfied with three Michelin stars or Robert Parker's 100 points," Pan told Bloomberg, referring to the notorious US wine critic. "We want to put everything that is high-end into one community, where horses are front and centre."
Horses are Pan's great passion. The Tianjin polo club was opened in November 2010 and is China's largest such institution. Pan is chairman of the Hong Kong Polo Development and Promotion Federation and was elected vice-president of the Federation of International Polo in December 2012.
"Polo is not simply a sport. It is a way of life. A shared set of values. Above all, it is a belief in a sense of nobility that defines those who would play the sport of kings," reads a statement on the club's website.
Referencing royalty is no simple public relations fluff. For the past two years, Goldin sponsored a polo event in Britain in which princes William and Harry took part, and Pan was photographed shaking hands with and grinning next to the two heirs to the realm.
Like many of China's nouveau riche, Pan has also invested heavily in wine. In May 2011, he flew by private jet to California's Napa Valley, returning to China a mere 24 hours later having snapped up Sloan Estate, one of the region's most sought-after vineyards, for US$50 million.
"There's so much demand for wine in China, and right now you can see it's a phenomenon on the table during business dinners," Jenny Pan, a former Goldman Sachs trader who took control of the winery after her father finalised the deal, told China Central Television in 2012.
"Wine is his passion," Goldin vice-chairman Harvey Lee Chi-chung told the earlier this year, and the purchase of Sloan was the "first step in a 100-step process" to build a global wine business. "We are long-term greedy. Our main focus now is to buy top-quality properties."
Those properties include three vineyards in Bordeaux bought for €15 million (HK$146 million), including the prestigious Chateau Le Bon Pasteur. At the time of the sale, Pan was bullish about future expansion, saying "we will continue to look out for other wine-related opportunities both within China, Hong Kong, and in other parts of the world."
These plans may have been scuppered by the central government's crackdown on corruption and conspicuous consumption. Imports of wine fell 20.7 per cent year on year in the first quarter, and sales of other luxury items, such as Swiss watches and expensive liquor, have also suffered.
